CRL Newsletter

The Coordinated Interplay Account of Utterance Comprehension, Attention, and the Use of Scene Information

Pia Knoeferle

Center for Research in Language, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

This paper reviews recent research on the interplay between language comprehension processes, attention to relevant objects and events, and the use of scene information for comprehension. It discusses, in particular, claims that information from scene events is prioritized over stereotypical thematic role knowledge during comprehension, and claims regarding a close temporal coordination between comprehension, visual attention, and the use of scene information. The discussion takes into account findings from different modalities (spoken comprehension versus reading), as well as insights regarding the decay of recently inspected scene information that is no longer present during language comprehension. We consider the implications of these findings for a recently proposed account of the coordinated interplay between utterance processing, attention, and the rapid use of scene information during comprehension.